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PERSPECTIVE
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Buyers for your ball washer and lefty glove?
For golf pro shops, the upcoming months will be critical for a profitable 2007. If sales were below par last year, search engine marketing, or SEM, is the way to reach the top of the leaderboard. Americans conducted more than 5 billion online searches in 2006, and that number will grow by double-digits in 2007. The most common consumer search? Product-plus-location.
Since shoppers are flocking to the Internet, pro shops can drive big sales for golf merchandise with a balanced SEM campaign. Here are the key elements for success.
Search engine optimization, or SEO, is the art and science of boosting a Web site’s position on Google™ and the other search engines when shoppers conduct a search. Selecting the right keyword phrases is essential, because competition is fierce. Note the number of Web pages found by Google™ for these searches—
- “Golf balls Chicago?—11.9 million;
- “Golf balls Dallas?—3.2 million; and,
- “Ball retrievers Cincinnati?—204,000.
Yet, because merchants rarely give SEO the attention it deserves, the few that optimize their site properly outrank the competition and attract substantial consumer traffic.
Paid search campaigns perfectly complement SEO once a keyword strategy is in place. Although merchants have many advertising options to choose from, various forms of pay-per-click, or PPC, generally work best. With PPC, the pro shop bids on keywords it expects consumers to use when searching for golf products. When a search for those keywords is conducted, the pro shop’s ad appears on the search engine as a “sponsored link.? No cost is incurred unless the consumer clicks on the ad.
One variety of PPC works particularly well for pro shops. Local search, also referred to as “geo-targeting,? allows merchants to display ads only when consumers in a specific geographic market conduct searches. Since 36 percent of all searches are for local products, the likelihood of a “click? turning into a sale are much higher when the pro shop focuses close to home. Google™, Yahoo!®, and MSN® offer powerful local search programs that are improving every day.
Since golfers tend to be a sociable group, pay-per-call advertising holds great promise as an SEM technique. Pay-per-call ads work much like regular PPC, but instead of asking consumers to “click,? ads invite them to phone the merchant. Consumers often prefer live conversation — especially when shopping for golf equipment, where price is a factor and product options abound.
Perhaps the best feature of SEM is that “mulligans? are allowed! Using Web analytics programs, pro shops can evaluate advertising results and continually improve campaigns. And, merchants need not wait for a stroke of genius to tee up an online marketing program. By selecting an experienced and versatile SEM partner, they can swing into action immediately.
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